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THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 14, 2015
RT
Museums Short List
Metropolitan Museum
"Ancient Egypt Transformed:
The Middle Kingdom." Through
Jan. 24.
Museum of Modern Art
"Walid Raad." Through Jan. 31.
Guggenheim Museum
"Alberto Burri: The Trauma of
Painting." Through Jan. 6.
The Whitney Museum
"Frank Stella: A Retrospective."
Through Feb. 7.
Brooklyn Museum
"Stephen Powers: Coney Island
Is Still Dreamland (To a Seagull)."
Through March 16.
Frick Collection
"Andrea del Sarto: The
Renaissance Workshop in
Action." Through Jan. 10.
New Museum
"Jim Shaw: The End Is Here."
Through Jan. 10.
galleries Short List
Uptown
"Painting Tranquility:
Masterworks by Vilhelm
Hammershøi from SMK"
Scandinavia House
58 Park Ave., at 38th St.
212-779-3587.
Through Feb. 27.
"William Kentridge:
Drawings for 'Lulu' "
Marian Goodman
24 W. 57th St. 212-977-7160.
Through Dec. 19.
Chelsea
Claes Oldenburg and
Coosje van Bruggen
Cooper
534 W. 21st St. 212-255-1105.
Through Dec. 12.
Bridget Riley
Zwirner
525 W. 19th St. 212-727-2070.
Through Dec. 19.
Matthew Weinstein
Lewis
521 W. 26th St. 212-643-6353.
Through Dec. 12.
Downtown
"The Description of a New
World, Called the Blazing
World"
Algus
132 Delancey St. 212-844-0074.
Through Dec. 13.
Museums and Libraries
Whitney Museum
"Rachel Rose:
Everything and More"
The young artist makes her impressive
New York début with a trans ixing
video created for the museum at
the invitation o the sharp curator
Christopher Y. Lew. The non-narra-
tive collage combines footage, shot
by Rose, o a space-station research
facility, an E.D.M. concert, and low-
tech galactic abstractions created in
her studio. (Imagine a drifting Milky
Way that involves real milk.) The
soundtrack sifts together wordless
vocals by Aretha Franklin (extracted
from "Amazing Grace") and a re-
cording o the American astronaut
David Wol talking with Rose, over
the phone, about the pleasures and
perils o space. The result is an
ecstatic epic about gravities, literal
and igurative, which unfolds onscreen
for eleven minutes and orbits in the
mind's eye for days. Through Feb. 7.
Studio Museum in Harlem
"A Constellation"
In this winning show, the curator
Amanda Hunt elegantly pairs
eighteen young artists with eight o
their elders. A superb Faith Ringgold
tapestry, which incorporates portraits
o Harlem residents, resonates with
the intriguing, domestic scenes
on fabric by the young Malawian
artist Billie Zangewa. A Plexiglas
box by Cameron Rowland, which
evokes the bulletproo windows at
check-cashing stores, shares an acid
critique with David Hammons's
smashed piggy bank, illed with
cowrie shells in lieu o coins. I the
show has a weak link, it's painting:
the overhyped Hugo McCloud, for
one, disappoints with a red canvas
that owes too much to Tachism.
But such low points are more than
made up for by stirring works like
the tiny diorama o police brutality
mounted in a jewelry box by the
Canadian-Trinidadian Talwst, an
uncommonly delicate elegy to Eric
Garner. Through March 6.
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Galleries---Chelsea
Steven Arnold
Channelling the spirits o Aubrey
Beardsley and Jack Smith, this
California artist photographed extrav-
agantly theatrical tableaux in black
and white, in the nineteen-eighties.
(He died in 1994.) He transformed
his subjects, nearly all o them nudes,
into gods and goddesses---winged,
crowned, levitating. (Jesus also makes
a homoerotic cameo.) Arnold was
a protégé o Salvador Dali, and he
shared the Surrealist's eye for prolif-
erating detail---one igure is framed
by a radiating network o shells. But
his approach to myth and mystery
is even cheekier, anticipating the
voluptuous spectacles o Pierre et
Gilles. Through Dec. 19. (Cooney,
508 W. 26th St. 212-255-8158.)
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
An optician with a spiritual bent,
Meatyard, the self-taught photog-
rapher from Kentucky, who died in
1972, worked in a style that veered
in mood between Southern Gothic
and Zen. He stayed close to home,
taking pictures o his wife and
children in the natural world, and
in and around abandoned houses.
(This big, engaging retrospective o
small, black-and-white work includes
a number o images that have never
been previously shown.) Meatyard's
eye on his family is far from idyllic.
His sons and daughter, in particular,
appear isolated and oddly fraught---a
children's pantomime version o
Beckett. Images o twigs, grasses,
and wooded landscapes are more
meditative, dissolving into abstraction.
Through Dec. 23. (DC Moore, 535
W. 22nd St. 212-247-2111.)
Jean Tinguely
American arts institutions are waking
up to the importance o Nouveau
Réalisme, the French counterstrike to
abstract painting. Tinguely, who died
in 1991, was one o the movement's
original members, best known in New
York for installing a self-destructing
piece in the sculpture garden at MOMA,
in 1960. He hooked up welded assem-
blages to motors, whose herky-jerky
movements still seem hazardous, even
animalistic. Many o the specimens
here have their original engines; the
largest is rigged to a timer that agitates
tractor wheels and colorful feathers.
There are smaller ones that you can
operate, too, using buzzers; in the 1984
work "Trü elsau," a skeletal boar's jaw
opens wide and snaps shut. Through
Dec. 19. (Gladstone, 530 W. 21st St.
212-206-7606.)
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Galleries---Downtown
Robert Attanasio
In his witty "Sound Camera Rotation,"
from 1977, the long-haired ilmmaker
and his friend stand outside the
Guggenheim and mimic its spiral
structure, irst by spinning in place,
then by riding in a taxi around the
block. Though the ilm suggests
orthodox structuralism, it's also a
slapstick gem. First, they can't ind a
cab big enough for the camera; then,
they get stuck in tra ic, interrupted
by children, and, inally, freak out
when the camera almost runs out o
ilm. After it opened, the show turned
unexpectedly elegiac: Attanasio died
last month, after a brie illness, at
the age o sixty-three. Through Dec.
20. (Junior Projects, 139 Norfolk St.
212-228-8045.)
Saloua Raouda Choucair
The Lebanese modernist has her irst
gallery show in the U.S. a year shy
o her hundredth birthday. Choucair
studied with Léger in Paris before
returning to Beirut in 1951, and her
paintings, sculptures, and decorative
objects e ortlessly interlock European
abstraction with the heritage o Is-
lamic arts. Rhythmic, high-spirited
compositions o colored ellipses and
crescents jump from vivid gouaches
to wall hangings and rugs. In three
dimensions, Choucair tends toward
modular stacks o terra cotta or stone.
Some, like a 1973 model for public
housing, could it in your hand; three
much larger stone totems invite fa-
vorable comparisons with Brâncuși.
Through Dec. 20. (CRG, 195 Chrystie
St. 212-229-2766.)
Gordon Parks
These lush, color photographs o
an extended black family in Mobile
and Shady Grove, Alabama, were
shot on assignment for Life, in 1956.
The story, part o a series on segre-
gation, helped to spark a national
conversation about race. Parks took
a photojournalistic approach, but
objective doesn't mean unconcerned,
and his empathy for his subjects
shines through. Life didn't print
some o the most striking images
here, including a portrait o a mother
and daughter in pastel party dresses,
standing under a red neon sign that
reads "Colored Entrance." Seen six
decades later, in the era o the Black
Lives Matter movement, the work
remains poignant, infuriating, and
powerful. Through Dec. 20. (Salon
94 Freemans, 1 Freeman Alley. 212-
529-7400.)
Hans Schärer
The Swiss autodidact painted with an
intensity and an oddity that placed
him beyond the mainstream. In the
nineteen-sixties and seventies, Schärer
created the dozens o gritty, kohl-eyed
Madonnas seen here, often with bared
teeth and a third eye. But there's no
Virgin to be found in the gloriously
bonkers erotic watercolors he was
painting at the same time, in which
nude women prostrate themselves
before maypoles, rut for stadium
crowds, and suckle at a three-nip-
pled breast in the sky. Distinctions
between the sacred and the profane
become as meaningless as those be-
tween "outsider" and "insider" artist.
Through Feb. 7. (Swiss Institute, 18
Wooster St. 212-925-2035.)
Samson Young
Throughout his exhibition, the young
Hong Kong-based artist performs, for
six hours a day, at a desk crowded with
instruments, both traditional (a bass
drum) and alternative (boxes o dirt).
During a recent visit, he was busy
translating video footage o the Iraq
war, circa 2003, into percussive bursts
via short-wave radios. Musical scores
hung framed on the gallery walls and
their expression markings---"Feigned
withdrawal: moderato"; "Exposed
lank: spirito"---inscribed the spare
music with an additional martial
resonance, making every bass hit
sound like an exploding land mine.
Through Dec. 20. (Team, 47 Wooster
St. 212-279-9219.)